Did you know that Sammy Davis Jr. lost his eye as a result of an automobile accident on Route 66? Did you know Doolittle, Missouri, was renamed for the aviation pioneer, General Doolittle, that led the first air raid on Tokyo during World War II? Did you know that before 1937, Route 66 between Albuquerque and Santa Fe followed the path of the El Camino Real, a major Spanish colonial roadway.
Today's Route 66 trivia questions and notes are indicative of the interesting odds and ends being discovered in my research for the next book, Ghost Towns of Route 66. To say I am eager to see this published and in the hands of those planning an adventure on the double six would be akin to saying Fargo, North Dakota, is a bit chilly in January.
Meanwhile there are other projects also requiring my attention. This weekend I need to address the website, http://www.route66infocenter.com/, as I have a great deal of new material. In addition I offered Cort Stevens the site as a venue for displaying the photographs taken on his voyage of discovery on Route 66 this past fall.
Then there is The Independent Thinker, the monthly column I write for Cars & Parts magazine. I need to go through my photo files as I want to find a unique individual to profile, perhaps the fellow behind the air cooled Chevrolet debacle in 1921 or the Stanley brothers, the men behind the legendary steam powered automobiles that were also instrumental in the formation of Eastman Kodak.
Of course I will need a break from work and the office. So, if the weather is as nice as projected my dearest friend and I will have no choice but to savor the sunshine with a nice outing into the Cerbat Mountains. If so you can be sure we will have photos.
In the mean time its back to the salt mine. Lunch break is over so ...

FORGOTTEN COUSIN OF ROUTE 66

The Route 66 trivia note for the day is a brief one. Route 66 was not fully paved until late 1936. The final section to be updated from graded gravel to all weather asphalt was east of Hackberry in Truxton Canyon.
Now, a little something to pique the interest of those in search of the Route 66 experience but on a less famous, less traveled highway. I presnt to you U.S. 6, the forgotten cousin to U.S. 66.
You are in good company if you are not aware of this highway, its history, or its many charms. Its obscurity is a large part of the allure.
Until the 1960s this was the longest U.S. highway stretching from Cape Cod to Long Beach in California. This also resulted in it being the only highway to run north and south as well as east and west.
Today the western terminus is in Bishop, California, still a very long and very scenic drive from Cape Cod. Amazingly the highway is about 95% intact and driveable.
This is the highest U.S. highway topping Loveland Pass in Colorado at 11,990 feet. To the west in Utah, it rolls across dry lake beds in some of the most empty deserts in America. This section was not paved until the early 1950s making six the last U.S. highway to be completely paved.
The highway crossing on the Hudson River is breathtaking as is the stunning scenery in Pennsylvania. There is the shore of the Great Lakes and Great Basin National Park, ghost towns, and attractions such as Cedar Point in Ohio and Pioneer Village in Nebraska.
Motels and diners, service stations and garages suspended in a time warp circa 1960 abound. Likewise with odd sites and roadside attractions.
Most everyone is a fan of the double six. Still, on occasion its nice to take to the road less traveled and that is the charm of U.S. 6, it is the best of both worlds. Road Trip: A Journey Along Route 6

ROUTE 66 GHOST TOWNS OF THE MOJAVE DESERT

Lets start with the Route 66 trivia of the day. As I am gathering momentum for an in depth exploratory tour of the Mojave Desert section of Route 66, and portions of the National Old Trails Highway, later this month todays trivia pertains to one of the ghost towns along that stretch of the venerable old highway, Essex.
As with most communities along this portion of the highway Essex began life as an isolated siding and water stop for the railroad. In an effort to promote automotive travel and the need for good roads the Automobile Club of Southern California dug a well here in the teens and promoted free water.
The establishment of a garage, market, and filling station in the following years reflected the growing importance of this highway as well as the changing face of the nation as America took to the road. The addition of a small school and post office enhanced the sense this was more than a pit stop in a sea of desert wasteland.
During World War II, rationing of gasoline greatly curtailed travel and traffic on Route 66 slowed to a trickle. Other remote communities dependant on the highway suffered immensely but Essex was a minature boom town, the result of massive war games that engulfed vast tracts of the Mojave Desert, the largest in history, under the guidance of General Patton. In addition, three miles to the north the Essex Army Airfield was established as well as a POW camp for Italian military personnel.
The brightest spot in the dusty wide spot in the roads history came in 1977 during the waning years of U.S. 66. In that year a feature story in the Los Angeles Times noted Essex was the last community in the lower 48 states without television service.
Johnny Carson picked up on the story and issued an invitation for the entire town of 35 residents to attend his program. This publicity led a Pennsylvania company to donate the equipment needed and Essex entered the modern era.
Today the post office and small school remain as the last active institutions in town.
Okay, new business. I officially began writing Ghost Towns of Route 66 this past weekend. To say the least, I am finding the project to be most interesting.
In the next few posts I will introduce you to the forgotten wonders and surprising history of Goffs, Goldroad, and a few other places that have vanished from the map in recent decades. I think you will be very surprised.
This isn't really Route 66 related but I found this book to be quite fascinating. American Road is an interesting snap shot of the challenges involved with automotive travel in the closing years of the teens. It is also a delightful introduction to a forgotten footnote to American history.

GHOST TOWNS OF ROUTE 66

Today there will be two trivia posts as I was on the road yesterday. The subject of both is ghost towns on Route 66.
This photo is of the old Truxton Canyon Indian Agency School in the ghost town of Valentine, Arizona. The school is one of the last remnants of a vast complex built during the first decades of the 20TH century.
In 1958, a distraught and violent young man from Peach Springs climbed into the rocks above the then closed school and began firing at vehicles passing below on Route 66 with his rifle. Traffic was halted at Peach Springs and in Kingman creating a massive traffic jam.
Clyde McCune, an officer with the Mohave County Sherriff's Department, subdued the young man after hours of working through the rocks to out flank him under a broiling Arizona sun. This was not McCune's first brush with death on Route 66. Nor was law enforcement his sole contribution to the colorful historyof Route 66.
In the late 1940s the Department of the Interior initiated studies for determining the feasibility of building a dam at Bridge Canyon near the present site of Grand Canyon West. McCune correctly concluded the such a project would have to make use of the Buck & Doe Road west of Peach Springs as this was the only road that connected Route 66 with that section of the canyon.
In partnership with Don Dilts, McCune purchased property between the Buck & Doe Road junction and Crozier Canyon on Route 66, and built a garage and service station in 1950. Business was brisk at the Truxton Garage and Dilts added another service station and restaurant.
The dam never was completed but Truxton thrived. By 1960, McCune's garage had morphed into a small town complete with post office, motels, service stations, and restaurants.
With completion of the I40 bypass in the 1970s, Truxton became an instant ghost town. Today the old town consists of one operating motel, the Frontier cafe, a service station and garage, a bar, Cowgill's market, ruins, foundations scattered throughout the brush, and a few dozen residents.
If you would like to read more about the Route 66 adventures of Clyde McCune, or dozens of other pioneers on the old double six, I suggest Route 66 Lives On The Road by Jon Robinson.

ROUTE 66 IN THE MOVIES

In light of the diverse landscapes that embrace Route 66 as well as a popularity that spans decades it should be no surprise to find this old highway has a lengthy association with the motion picture and television industry. What is surprising is the obscurity of some of this history.



In 1937, at the junction of US 666 and US 66 in Gallup, New Mexico, R.E. Griffith, brother to legendary movie mogul D.W. Griffith, opened the El Rancho Hotel & Motel. The stunning western landscapes that surrounded Gallup and extensive Hollywood contacts enabled R.E. Griffith to profit greatly as movie companies flocked to the area and his luxurious hotel became home away from home for the actors.


The guest register during the first thirty years for this Route 66 landmark is a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, Marx Brothers, Ronald Reagan, Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy to name but a few. Today the rooms named for past guests provide visitors with a tangible link to the glory days of Hollywood as well as Route 66.

There is a very persistent legend in Gallup that before World War II a member of the Navajo tribe, after an evening of sampling an excessive amount of hooch, liberated an automobile from the parking lot of the El Rancho for his return to the reservation rather than hitch a ride. As with many legends and fish stories size as well as value grow with each telling. In this instance the automobile is variously described as a Rolls Royce or Packard.

Rather than face the consequences of automobile theft, especially one belonging to a very important individual, the vehicle was abandoned somewhere in the vast expanses of the Navajo reservation. An alternate ending is that it served the remainder of its days as a truck meeting the needs of sheep herders deep in the desert wilderness near Monument Valley.

The inspiration behind Wallace and Mary Gunn’s decision to relocate their small trading post to the village of Cubero, New Mexico in 1937 was the endless stream of traffic on Route 66 that flowed through town. The trading post quickly morphed into a tourist court and café.


This remote oasis in a sea of awe-inspiring scenery became an unlikely outpost for celebrities during the 1940s and 1950s. Gene Tierney and Bruce Cabot stayed here during the filming of Sunset. Lucille Ball and her husband were frequent guests, as Vivian Vance owned a ranch nearby. Ernest Hemmingway spent several weeks here while writing The Old Man and the Sea.


The open spaces, the colorful and stark landscapes, and the proximity to Hollywood via Route 66 led a number of early movie companies to film in the area of Victorville, California. Many scenes in movies starring Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and William Hart, as well as in episodes of the Cisco Kid and the Lone Ranger, are still identifiable in the hills around this high desert community.


Roy Rogers became so enamored with the landscapes he purchased a ranch along Route and the Mohave River north of Victorville. Until its recent relocation to Branson, Missouri, the Roy Rogers Museum was located here.


The use of landscapes surrounding Victorville to add texture or feel to films was not limited to western epics. Nor are all of these associations ancient history. Movies filmed here include Harvey Girls, 1942, It Came From Outer Space, 1954, The Hills Have Eyes, 1977, Breakdown, 1997, Hitcher, 1986, and Kill Bill Volume 2, 2004.


The Green Spot Motel in Victorville, dating to 1937, remains as a tarnished gem on an older alignment of Route. For more than twenty years, the motel served as the focal point for the Hollywood crowd while staying in Victorville.


Perhaps the most notable association the Green Spot Motel has with movie history is the role the establishment played in the creation of Citizen Kane. It was here that John Houseman and Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the first two drafts of the script for this film.


The Oatman Hotel in Oatman, Arizona, no longer rents rooms but it still preserves the “suite” rented by Clark Gable and Carol Lombard who married in Kingman, Arizona in 1939. Oatman also figures prominently in several movies filmed in the area, Edge of Eternity, 1959, and Foxfire, 1955.

As an interesting foot note Edge of Eternity also featured scenes filmed at the site of the Skywalk at Grand Canyon West, about sixty miles north of Kingman and Route 66. These scenes incorporated the then abandoned cable car system that crossed the canyon at this point, an engineering marvel built by a mining company during the early 1950s.


Only a snowstorm prevented Flagstaff, Arizona, from becoming the center of the motion picture industry in the United States. In 1911, Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Laskey had decided to relocate their New York based motion picture company in an effort to find an area with access to more suitable landscapes for the filming of outdoor films.


When the train arrived in Flagstaff the deep blue skies, the towering pines, and the frosted San Francisco Peaks in the background immediately appealed to their artistic sensibilities. The euphoria was short lived, as two days after their arrival a storm that brought ferocious winds and an icy rain that soon turned to snow transformed the town into an artic landscape.


From Chicago to Santa Monica, Route 66 and its landmarks have appeared as backdrops in literally hundred of motion pictures. The original Colorado River crossing, the 1916 Old Trails Bridge, figures prominently in a scene in John Ford’s classic rendering of John Steinbeck’s, Grapes of Wrath. The bridges replacement that now serves as a river crossing for I40 is featured in the opening scenes of Easy Rider starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda.


The Big 8 Motel in El Reno, Oklahoma, dating to the 1940s, was but one of hundreds of motels lining Route 66 that enticed travelers with the colorful use of neon. It was as a backdrop in Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman that the old motel had a brief moment of glory before its closing.













The Tavern, now a machine shop and an old store turned residence, now demolished, on the original alignment of Route 66, Old Trails Road, in Kingman, Arizona, figured prominently in Roadhouse 66, starring Judge Reinhold. Cool Springs, now a refurbished time capsule, was the location for an explosive action sequence in Universal Soldier, starring Dolph Lundgren.

For this same movie, on the east facing wall of the old cafe next to the Hotel Beale, now razed, a mural was painted to imitate a vintage bus company advertisement. What the movie company did not know is the Hotel Beale served as a stop for the Picwick and Greyhound bus lines.


In an odd twist the television program, Route 66, that debuted in 1960 and that starred George Maharis and Martin Milner was instant success at a time when the popularity of its namesake highway was waning. Even more ironic is the fact that in the filming of the program few scenes were filmed on Route 66.